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I have 2 ubi and 2 amazon echo. I only want to use my ubi. it is more life like response. my echo is robots talk. I really wish ubi guys had the money to keep it going. I am glad I have a ubi. hope it becomes a collector items. if ubi Jason gets money to update the ubi. I will by another! ! now 2 updates needed 1. wifi Fallout (even 2feet from router) 2. the ubi needs better ears to hear.. thanks

Unfortunately it's unlikely the Ubi is going to have any life left in it. In particular, the update for the Mic is a hardware, not a software one, so unless you want to get into hardware modding, it'll never hear as well as Echo does.

FWIW, I've found Google Home to be a bit of an upgrade over Echo... particularly when it comes to interactions with IFTTT...

Two things make it very nice: First, you don't have to have say "trigger" to get Google Home to look at IFTTT phrases. Second, Google Home's IFTTT setup allows you to specify up to three different ways to say the phrase.

For example, I have, with my SmartThings, a SmartApp setup so that I can say to open my garage door and it will only open it if it's closed. Likewise, if I say to close the garage, it will only close it if it's open.

With Echo, I need to say this: "Alexa, trigger the garage open."

With Google Home I can say: "Hey Google, open the garage" or "Hey Google, open the garage door" or "Hey Google, open garage door." Any one of those three phrases will work, making it more like natural English.

Now here's my biggest problem with Google Home and Echo/Alexa: Why is it that a small start up with a shoestring budget can get their hardware to have simple Text-to-Speech capabilities, but both the mega companies of Amazon and Google can't figure out how to make this work??